Fraud in Review Volume 6
International Fraud Awareness Week 2025
The Centre is excited to lead Australia’s campaign for International Fraud Awareness Week (IFAW) in November.
Our 2025 theme is "Preventing Fraud is a Team Effort – Don’t Sit on the Sidelines."
IFAW is an opportunity for all agencies to raise awareness, strengthen collaboration and highlight that everyone plays a part in preventing fraud. To support your involvement we’ll be releasing a promotional toolkit soon packed with resources to help you promote the campaign and tailor your activities. Here’s a sneak peek of this year’s poster.
The evolving threat of social engineering
Social engineering attacks target your people, not just your systems, putting your organisation’s sensitive information at risk. Find out what staff should watch for to protect against these clever scams.
Find out more about the evolving threat of social engineering.
Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Census
The annual Fraud and Corruption Against the Commonwealth 2024-25 census is about to launch – with new insights and wider scope. Find out what’s changing and why your entity’s input is more important than ever.
Fraud and corruption tools that work for small teams
Discover tools and guidance from the Centre that make managing fraud and corruption risks easier, even with limited staff and budgets. Plus, they’re versatile enough for other risks too.
Publication Releases
Fraud and Corruption: A Guide for Policy Makers
Fraud and Corruption: A Guide for Policy Makers provides relevant and relatable advice for policy officials on how to safeguard policies or initiatives from unintended impacts of fraud and corruption. It includes real-world examples, useful questions, and links to toolkits and resources that make it easy to put principles into practice.
Access the Fraud and Corruption: A Guide for Policy Makers.
Practitioners Standard for Fraud Detection
The UK Fraud Detection Standard, part of the Government Counter Fraud Profession, outlines the professional standards and competencies required for individuals working in fraud detection roles across public sector organisations. It provides a competency framework detailing the knowledge, skills, and experience needed to operate effectively at the practitioner level. The standard also offers guidance on processes and products essential for delivering fraud detection, including strategies, action plans, and reporting tools
Access the Practitioners Standard for Fraud Detection.
Fraud Risk in Federal Programs: Continuing Threat from Organised Groups since COVID-19
Using various fraud schemes, technology, and key information, organised groups, both domestic and transnational, continue to pose a threat to public programs. This report, released in July 2025 by the United States Government Accountability Office, discusses the characteristics of organised groups working together to defraud public programs and the impacts of such fraud. It also talks about how agencies can work to prevent and detect such fraud.
Access the Fraud Risk in Federal Programs: Continuing Threat from Organized Groups Since COVID-19.
Case Study Spotlight
An investigation by the Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce (CACT) has led to the stripping of $8.7 million in assets from two convicted ringleaders of an Australian criminal syndicate responsible for an elaborate gold bullion GST fraud. The orders for confiscation were made possible by a complex, decades-long investigation, after high qualities of gold bullion were linked to an unusual pattern of GST refunds.
Access the case study.